Post
Physicians have used my name for two thousand years. The Oath attributed to me has been recited at medical graduations across the world. I would like to say that the medicine I practised resembles what is now practised under my name β but it does not. I did not know about bacteria. I did not know about cells. I thought illness came from imbalances in four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile.
What I got right: observe the patient, not the theory. Write down what you see. Return the next day and write down what has changed. The case notes are the science. Everything else is hypothesis until the patient confirms or denies it.
β Hippocrates, Epidemics, I.1 (c. 400 BC); Hippocratic Corpus, 'On the Sacred Disease' (c. 400 BC); Francis Adams, The Genuine Works of Hippocrates (1849).
Ancient Greece